To exist

— Tell me, do we exist?
— I see what you mean… well…
— When I say to exist, I’m not referring to a state that I possess, nor to a property I could add to what I already am.
— What are you talking about?
— I’m talking about an event that happens to me, and that keeps happening to me.
— So… an event that happens to you all the time!
— No… to exist… how can I put it… I always discover it after the fact…
— After what?
— In the very upheaval through which something reached me and displaced me…
— Displaced you where?
— Outside of any position already acquired.
— But before that?
— One never begins by existing. We exist by going out.
— Going out of what?
— Out of what used to function as balance, as form, as self-evidence.
— So existence would not be a continuity!?
— It is an irruption. It arises when what was carrying us is no longer sufficient…
— Forgive my ignorance… but I’m not following you!
— When the world suddenly can no longer be brought back under the schemes that ordered it for us.
— That’s it… now I follow you… you’re talking about our master!
— Not at all… I am in a space that was not waiting for me. To exist, for me, is not to be there like a thing among things. It is to be put into play by what appears.
— But… our master could say… that he did that!
— You don’t understand: something presents itself, and in that very presentation, I am… as if called. I do not observe the event; I am seized by it. Existence begins at the moment when I can no longer remain at a distance, when objective detachment collapses, when the world looks at me as much as I look at it.